DIY

This Christmas, I have searched high and low for a knight ornament for Mr. Knight’s alma mater (and namesake). I even contacted Bunnywithatoolbelt (who made our cake toppers) to make a miniature knight ornament for us, but a custom piece proved to be a little more expensive then I had in mind. Then I thought, why not make our sweet little cake toppers into ornaments?

Hello, I love you.

They aren’t really doing anything right now, and we really haven’t decided what we were going to do with them (besides store them safely).

I had thought about putting them on a shelf, but with frisky kitties I’ve learned to not leave anything sentimental/expensive out to be knocked down. I had thought of placing them in a shadow box with our invitation and picture from our wedding, but that just didn’t seem quite right to me. So, when making them into ornaments came to mind, I thought “perfect.”

When I told Mr. Knight about my idea, I believe his response (via Gchat) was “OMG YES.” Love him♥

I wanted to be as minimally invasive as possible with these precious pieces. I just simply took some extra string I had and tied them around the neck of each. I know, sounds really awful that I hung our little toppers by their necks.

And VIOLA! These babies are now fabulous little additions to our Christmas tree!I apologize for the terrible images. Mr. Knight would scold me if he knew I was uploading these images for a post!

Don’t you just love them? I sure do.

We plan to keep them safe and sound in our wedding box when they aren’t on our tree. Bringing them out each year will be so much fun, because it will make us go through all our wedding memories. :) Besides, putting our tree up every year is like taking a trip down memory lane as most of our ornaments were picked up from places we visited together, and special memories which connect us both. Our cake topper ornaments will just be the icing on the cake. Get it? Oh boy, I’m getting lame!

Now, I just have to pray to the Kitty Gods that Gator Kitty and Pepper will leave our precious cake toppers alone.

What are your plans for your cake toppers after your wedding? Will they go into storage? Do you have a special project from them? Or, will you follow my lead and make them into fabulous ornaments for your Christmas Tree?

Are you ready for this? I’ve been chomping at the bit to share what I’ve been working on these past few months. Putting our wedding album together has been an incredible undertaking. Who knew putting together a modern and simple album would be so involved? Well, it only became “involved” because I tend to make any project I do spiral out of control. I totally understand, now, why clients pay their photographers the big bucks to put these babies together.

That’s a shiz load of albums right there!

What? You want to see them NOW? I’m sorry my beautiful readers, these are Christmas gifts for our family! I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise of what’s inside, now would I? But, being that I spent so much time (i.e. blood, sweat, tears, coca colas), I wanted to share a little “peek peek” with y’all.

Stay tuned after the holidays for a full write-up on these babies!

Did/do y’all plan to put together your own wedding album or was an album by your photographer’s included in your package? If you plan to put your own together, what company do you plan to go with? I highly suggest AdoramaPix, the quality is RIDICULOUS amazing.

Look what Mr. Knight and I found hiding in Gator Dad and Gator Momma’s pantry…

Gator Dad and Gator Momma have been drinking these babies since our Wedding, over 4 months ago.

And our altar fabric lived on at our cousin’s Wedding this past weekend…

Hello GORGEOUS Casa Monica Wedding. Not only are our cousin’s the cutest couple to get married EVER, but the Bride wore an orange and blue garter embroidered with “Gator Bride.” Can we say AWESOME? Love her.
source Emily E Martin Photography

Mr. Knight and I took TONS of video footage at their Wedding. There was so much love, happy tears, laughter, gator chomps, and down right crazy shenanigans for us not to! Look for a video/photo recap soon… well, as soon as I can get Mr. Knight away from the TV. He has been watching football ALL DAY!

And if you haven’t entered my giveaway for a $25 Olive Garden gift card, then you better get your butt over there and do so!

Have you found your wedding items living on in ways you would have never thought?

Okay, so I loved EVERYTHING about our wedding. Well, just about everything except for our darn Florist. He was ‘the suck.’

Poor Happy Bridesmaid had to carry such an offending bouquet. I don’t understand how a florist can get MY bouquet mostly right but completely mess up the bridesmaid bouquets. Yes, those are rogue daisy leaves left by our florist. You can see more pictures of these bouquets in my beautiful bridesmaids post.photo by Starks Photography

Every time I think back to our wedding, I think about all the beautiful people and details… then I get to those dang bridesmaid bouquets and I just about want to cry. Here was our plan: Mr. Knight and I would order/put together all the flowers for the reception (with the help from my AMAZING bridesmaids and day-of-coordinator) and the only thing we were going to order was the bouquets, bouts and corsages from a florist. Saving us some much needed $$$ since Mr. Knight and I were footing the bill for many of these wedding ‘accessory’ items.

A few months before the wedding we dropped by a florist in Ormond Beach near our wedding location. We only had time to visit one location since we lived out of town (2 hours away from our wedding location). We met with the owner, checked out all the beautiful pictures of flowers he had done and then showed him our inspiration (below).

Sweet, romantic and whimsical. Those were our 3 words. What did we get? I cringe every time I think about our bouquets. Cringe with embarrassment and cringe at their heinous weed/store bought/5-year-old craft/ugly-ness.
collage made from: Mtux, David’s Bridal, OnceWed, Project Wedding

He said that he loved my daisy look and thought I should make a big statement by having just daisies. I agreed with him and then we moved forward to bridesmaid bouquets and my bouquet. I was overall happy with our consultation and couldn’t wait to see how all the bouquets looked the night before the wedding.

Fast forward to May 14, the Friday before our wedding. I showed up at our Florist, with my bridesmaids in tow, to check out our bouquets.What did I see? Utter heinousness. From the GOLD ribbon he wrapped MY bouquet with, to the lack-luster bridesmaid bouquets that looked like a package of Winn-Dixie $3 daises were just wrapped in ribbon. Just awful. I was immediately let down. I didn’t really know what to do. I critiqued him, told him what to fix and to add tons more white daisies to my bouquet and my bridesmaid’s bouquets. But those bridesmaid bouquets were just awful and I didn’t know what to do.. and what is even worse is that the florist didn’t even recognize how bad they looked. I mean.. I was basically paying $45 a bouquet for him to drive to Winn-Dixie, purchase a $3 bunch of white daisies and wrap a ribbon around them.

Don’t they look like they just picked those daisies out of a random pasture, or rather WEEDS and bunched them up to make a bouquet? Ahh.. this is such a sore point for me.Picture taken by one of our wedding guests

I was so busy the day before the wedding, so frazzled, so OVER IT, that I just let the bouquets go. I was just like ‘whatever I can’t handle this right now’ and we left the florist. I’m NEVER like this. I’m that person that has to critique something to the Nth degree. I believe I had just reached a breaking point and I decided… F it… I don’t care (please excuse my profanity!). My bridesmaid’s were pretty silent as they looked at the bouquets in horror. Looking back, I wish they had spoken up to help me (sometimes I try to be ‘nice’ and not tell vendors how I REALLY feel). But if I were my bridesmaid’s I probably wouldn’t have said anything either.

Did I mention the florist forgot to leave me a ‘toss’ bouquet, as outlined in our contract? Details. Details. I ended up throwing my ACTUAL bouquet for the toss. One of my bridesmaid’s offered to give me her bouquet to toss, but I felt bad tossing a bouquet of weeds to our wedding guests.

On a happier note, the reception flowers were AMAZING. I couldn’t have asked for them to be any better! I remember walking into the reception, right before our ceremony, and seeing all the flowers, I just wanted to cry they were so beautiful. Exactly what I wanted in EVERY WAY.

Hello GORGEOUS, cheerful, bright and happy. I loved these arrangements our day-of coordinator put together with the flowers we bought. I nearly cried at how perfect they were.photo by Starks Photography

Baby arrangement on the bistro tables during the cocktail hour. These are soo cute.photo by Starks Photography; you can see what our table centerpieces looked like at the beginning of our wedding video.

We ordered white daisies from Fifty Flowers ,fuchsia gerbera daisies from Sam’s Club, and placed cut up lemons in all the vases. They showed up the Thursday before the wedding, and two of my amazing bridesmaids, Sunny MOH and Seminole Bridesmaid, helped me to cut/hydrate and transport them to our reception site.

3 of the 5 buckets of flowers we had. Sooo gorgeous. And those fuchsia gerbera daisies were beautiful!photo taken on Mrs Gator’s iPhone

Loading the flowers into Mr. Knight’s truck. The truck was a recent purchase on our part and we are so thankful that we took the plunge and got a new vehicle a few weeks before the wedding. We wouldn’t have been able to transport all our wedding goodies/our honeymoon goodies/gifts/and Gator Kitty without this truck (and my little car).photo taken on Mrs Gator’s iPhone by Gator Momma

Looking back on our wedding I know, without a doubt, that I could have made our bouquets everything I ever wanted, if I had done them myself. My stomach churns just thinking about how much we paid for those terribly sad looking bouquets. I look back at all my friend’s weddings that I was a bridesmaid in and remember how beautiful my bridesmaid bouquet was. I expected something amazing and I was let down by our florist. If you are looking for a florist in the Ormond Beach, FL/Daytona Beach area, contact me first so I can tell you who NOT to go to. Let me save you the embarrassment!

Our total on reception flowers (not even going to talk about wedding flowers because I despise our florist):

Total for Reception Flowers: $387.7716 centerpieces and 2 large arrangements; $21.54/per arrangementAmazingly the price per arrangement above doesn’t even include the many bud vases all over our reception. So ‘technically’ the per arrangement cost is even lower then I calculated! It certainly pays to do your own flowers!

Which I believe to be pretty darn amazing! We paid more on our ceremony flowers from the florist ‘who should not be named’ then for our BEAUTIFUL reception flowers. :-)

Phew… feels so good to get this all out. I’ve had all this pint up anger towards our florist, but I feel soooo much better now! But still… $45/per bouquet for what he showed up with was a little ridic.

Did you have any wedding day regrets? Did you wish you had gone with a different vendor or spoken up about something you didn’t like? Do you give anyone at your wedding/vendor/family member the ‘he who should not be named’ treatment after what they did at your wedding? Please SPILL!

After spending 2 hours this morning trying to figure out the best way to make our wedding album with Adorama, I decided to forget about trying to use their online software/salvage their templates. The easiest way to make our album to all my OCD wants/needs is to make it from scratch via Adobe InDesign.

InDesign and I became BFF this past year when I was putting together my Thesis book, so it was only natural that we rekindle our friendship and make a fantastical wedding album to give to our parents/grandparents/ourselves.

And so it begins…

Not sure where our wedding album is going right now. I’m just slowing working through it with these ideas in mind:

crisp

clean

modern

not all that ‘jazz’

something that is very ‘us’

After falling in love with some crazy album designs, I’ve decided to make ours simple, lovely, and to the point. Because really, does anyone look though a wedding album and go “ohhh I really like your font/embellishments/background.” No. Sorry for all the ‘slashes’ today… I’m feeling very slash-y.

Did I tell y’all I was going to make 4 albums (last time I blogged about this, we were only at 3)? How out of control am I?

Through Our Guest’s EyesA compilation of the photos our guest’s captured at our wedding. Some of them were able to capture the moments even better then our photographers, and moments we never witnessed!

Kyle {hearts} KimberlyOur Professional Wedding Pics Album

Just Mauied ♥ Our HoneymoonSomewhere to put the MASSIVE amount of photos Mr. Knight took in Maui

All of them are going to be made in the same 8″x10″ size Adorama album, and will have corresponding spines that make them appear as a ‘set’. Still not sure how to make them look like a ‘set’ on a shelf. I was thinking of having a heart on each spine in a different color (can you tell I love hearts?)… Not sure.

I’m off to more Wedding Album designing. Wish me luck! I will report back when I have something worth sharing. :-) Maybe several album covers, and a poll to help me decide which one to use? Stay tuned!